Definition
A writ of attachment is a court order directing a sheriff or other officer to seize a person, property, or both, either to compel obedience to a court order or to secure a defendant's assets pending the outcome of litigation.
The term has two distinct applications that are frequently conflated in historical sources:
1. CONTEMPT ENFORCEMENT (personal attachment): A writ commanding the sheriff to take a disobedient party into custody and bring them before the court to answer for contempt of a court order or judgment. This is the meaning emphasized in Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence.
2. PREJUDGMENT PROPERTY ATTACHMENT: A writ commanding an officer to seize a defendant's property at the outset of, or during, litigation to prevent its removal or dissipation before a judgment can be obtained and enforced. This is the more common modern usage and the primary sense in which the term appears in contemporary civil procedure.
Both meanings share the same procedural mechanism — a formal writ directing an officer to "attach" something — but they serve fundamentally different purposes: one enforces existing court authority over persons, the other secures prospective judgment remedies over property.
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Common Language
Wiktionary: Synonym of attachment.
Webster's 1913: No independent entry for "writ of attachment"; "attachment" is defined generally as "a seizure or taking by virtue of a legal process."
The common language usage tracks the legal meaning closely in form but masks the critical distinction above. Ordinary use of "attachment" suggests a single, unified concept of seizure. Legal usage splits into two meaningfully different procedural tools — one coercive and personal, one protective and proprietary — that arise at different stages of litigation, require different showings, and produce different consequences for the party affected. A researcher who treats the term as a simple synonym for "attachment" will miss this functional divide.
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Common Confusion
WRIT OF ATTACHMENT vs. WRIT OF EXECUTION: These are easily conflated because both can result in the seizure of property. The distinction is temporal and purposive. A writ of attachment issues before or during litigation to preserve assets; a writ of execution issues after judgment to satisfy it. Rapalje & Lawrence note that attachment may serve as a writ of execution in certain contexts — enforcing a judgment for recovery of chattels — but this is a secondary and historically bounded usage. In modern practice, treating attachment as execution will produce a serious research error.
WRIT OF ATTACHMENT vs. WRIT OF CAPIAS: Both may result in the physical seizure of a person. A capias is a general arrest writ issued to bring a defendant before the court; a writ of attachment in the contempt sense targets a party already before the court who has defied its authority. The practical overlap in early common law practice means historical sources sometimes use the terms interchangeably.
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Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Foreign attachment: A variant historically available in certain jurisdictions to attach property of a non-resident defendant at the commencement of suit, establishing jurisdiction over the property in lieu of personal jurisdiction over the defendant.
Mesne process attachment: Attachment issued during the pendency of an action (between commencement and judgment) to secure property against disposal.
Attachment for contempt: The personal attachment form; compels appearance of a party who has violated a court order.
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Why It Matters in Research
The single most important navigational fact for Law Mind corpus researchers: historical legal dictionaries — including all three source dictionaries here — define writ of attachment almost exclusively in the contempt-enforcement sense. Modern civil procedure uses the term almost exclusively in the prejudgment property-seizure sense. A researcher using Black's first or second edition as a guide to a modern civil procedure question about prejudgment remedies will be working from a definition that describes a functionally different instrument.
Chronological layering matters here. Sources through the mid-twentieth century weight the personal/contempt meaning. Post-Federal Rules sources increasingly weight the property/prejudgment meaning. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (Rule 64) govern attachment in federal court by incorporating state law, which means jurisdictional variation is substantial and any research relying on a single-jurisdiction source may not generalize.
Researchers working in the criminal law corpus should note that "attachment" has a separate technical meaning in double jeopardy doctrine — jeopardy "attaches" at a specific procedural moment. That usage shares the word but is doctrinally unrelated to the writ. See Double Jeopardy -- Attachment and Scope in the Criminal Law Encyclopedia.
Constitutional dimensions also apply to the prejudgment property attachment form. Due process requirements for notice and a hearing before prejudgment attachment were significantly developed through the latter twentieth century, meaning pre-1970s treatise and case material predates binding constitutional constraints now applicable in most jurisdictions.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries present substantially identical definitions, each tracing to the same secondary citation (Smith's Action at Law). This convergence reflects a common copying tradition in legal dictionary compilation and should not be read as independent corroboration. The uniformity also confirms that historical lexicographers were describing the contempt-enforcement writ and not the prejudgment property remedy — a major gap relative to modern practice.
Rapalje & Lawrence adds the most useful qualification, noting that the writ "is used not only as a writ of execution (e.g. to enforce a judgment for the recovery of chattels)" — acknowledging the property-seizure dimension, though still framing it as a subordinate usage rather than a primary one. This is the only historical source in the set that gestures toward the modern dominant meaning.
None of the source dictionaries address due process constraints, the role of judicial supervision in issuing the writ, or the bond requirements that typically accompany modern prejudgment attachment. These omissions are significant for any researcher using historical dictionary entries as a guide to current practice.
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Jurisdictional Note
Prejudgment attachment procedure varies substantially by state. Requirements for the showing needed to obtain a writ, the bond required of the plaintiff, the classes of property subject to attachment, and the procedural mechanism for the debtor to seek release of attached property all differ. Federal courts apply the law of the state in which they sit under Rule 64. Researchers should not generalize attachment procedure across jurisdictions without verifying state-specific rules.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Attachment, Garnishment, and Prejudgment Remedies — Civil Procedure & Evidence Encyclopedia (primary reference for the property-seizure form and modern procedural framework)
Coram Nobis and Other Extraordinary Writs — Criminal Law Encyclopedia (context for the writ as an instrument of court enforcement authority)
Double Jeopardy -- Attachment and Scope — Criminal Law Encyclopedia (for the unrelated but easily confused criminal law usage of "attachment")
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